SMU football: National titles, Doak Walker and the death penalty

Michigan's opponent this weekend, Southern Methodist, is a small school from Dallas, Texas, with an enrollment around 9,000. Its football team will enter Michigan Stadium Saturday with an 0-2 record on the field and a first-year head coach, Sonny Dykes. He has a long and complicated path ahead of him if he wants to bring the Mustangs back to where they once were, at the top of their conference and the pinnacle of college football.

It was the late 1970s and early 1980s when SMU dominated the college football landscape. They were heralded by some as national champions. Then came the steep, thundering fall - one that rendered the school's football program futile decades later.

College football was still in its infancy in the 1930s. Many teams remained independent, while conferences were a wild west of programs and teams. SMU was in the Southwest Conference when it went 12-1 in 1935, beating rival Texas Christian en route to a trip to the famed Rose Bowl. The Mustangs lost that game, 7-0 to Stanford, but still were still crowned national champions by the Dickinson System, a point formula used at the time to determine the best team in the country. So yes, polling was around back then, too. SMU would go on to claim national titles in 1981 and 1982, as we detail later on.

Does the name Doak Walker ring a bell to anyone? Well, the annual award handed out to the nation's best running back was named in honor of the three-time All-American, who played at SMU from 1945 to 1949. Walker not only ran the football, but he punted, returned punts and kickoffs, and kicked extra points. He was awarded the Heisman Trophy in 1948, two years after returning from a year of service in the U.S. Army. There's a plaque outside the main entrance of the Cotton Bowl, where SMU once played its home games, that reads: "The House that Doak Built." Walker went on to play for the Detroit Lions from 1950 to 1955, a span that saw the franchise go to three consecutive NFL championships.

SMU was the first football program in the heavily-segregated mid-1960s Southwest Conference to recruit a black player. Head coach at the time, Hayden Fry, courted a fast wide receiver by the name of Jerry LeVias, out of Beaumont, Texas, who went on to earn All-American honors and helped lead SMU to conference titles in 1966 and 1968. But in 2013, in a story for the Houston Chronicle, LeVias characterized his time at SMU as "a living hell." He had no roommates during his four years at SMU, he was the only black athlete on campus when he arrived, and he endured a constant stream of racial threats. "Coach Fry told me the more touchdowns I scored, the whiter I got," LeVias told The Chronicle. He went on to play six seasons in the NFL and has since been diagnosed with post-traumatic depression, he says.

After 11 seasons of Fry, and a short three-year stint for Dave Smith in the mid-1970s, SMU named Ron Meyer its head coach in 1976. And the program changed forever. Meyer, a former assistant coach with the NFL's Dallas Cowboys, took an aggressive and head-on approach to recruiting. He courted all-Texas running backs Eric Dickerson and Craig James in 1979, both of whom won state championships at their respective high schools, and with Charles Waggoner, formed the nation's most prolific rushing attack in what became known as ,"The Pony Express." SMU went 10-2 in 1980 and 10-1 in 1981, winning the Southwest Conference and earning recognition as national champions by the National Championship Foundation. (SMU finished No. 5 in the final AP poll that season.) From 1980 to 1984, SMU compiled a 51-7-1 record, won at least a share of the SWC championship three times and was recognized as national champions twice. Dickerson went on to play 13 seasons in the NFL, where he still holds the league's single-season rushing record of 2,105 yards and earned an induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1999. Then came the fall.